This is a blog about economics, history, law and other things that interest me.

Monday, January 11, 2016

Fleming on Slavery and the Civil War

The History
News Network posted a bizarre essay on slavery and the Civil War by Thomas Fleming.
I presume that it is based on his book, which, based on his essay, I have no
intention of reading. He suggests that he has a new understanding of the causes
of the Civil War. He notes that he is

“ forced to ask – not for
the first time – why Americans in general and scholars in particular do not
want to look at two solutions to slavery that might have avoided the holocaust
we call the Civil War and its aftermath of hate-laden racism. “

The first of these solutions that scholars do not want to
look at is compensated emancipation.

Not once but twice
Lincoln offered the South millions of dollars if they would agree to gradually
free their slaves over the next 40 or 50 years. With smears and sneers of rage
the South refused the offer. Why? –

Why? Perhaps it was because the value of slaves on the eve
of the Civil War is estimated to be about 3 billion dollars, not several
million. It has been estimated that even if the payments had been spread out
over twenty years the payments would have tripled the federal budget. See Roger
Ransom’s essay
at EH.NET for a quick review. The fact that it has been estimated suggests that
historians have considered this solution. Fleming seems to be suffering from “If
I haven’t read it, it hasn’t been written” syndrome.

I’m not going to go into Fleming’s second solution. The essence
of Fleming's argument is that there could be no peaceful emancipation because white
people in the South were afraid. Real historians, such as Alan Taylor, have
written about this fear, but they did not use it to make statements like

The South’s embrace of
slavery was not rooted in greed or a repulsive assumption of racial superiority.

I understand that HNN has a commitment to ideological
diversity, but they should also have some commitment to reasonable standards of
logic and evidence. Even if one were to make a reasonable case that fear had
come to dominate Southern thinking on emancipation during the Antebellum period,
how could you argue that slavery was not rooted in greed (profit seeking) and
racism: They originally imported African slaves as a humanitarian gesture
toward people that they regarded as equals? How exactly does that argument
work?